Is it watching the news footage from home and crying, shaking our heads?

Is it the disbelief, fractured yet again, that there are people in the world who would brazenly murder innocents, this time so close to home?

Is it the knowledge that because of this, we may never be able to look at the finish line of a marathon without an involuntary shudder? Is it the knowledge that there will never again be a day where something like this hasn’t happened yet?

What is the hardest part?

Is it looking at our phones, our computer screens, our televisions, and wondering how we are going to tell our children that there are people in the world like this — that there are people in the world who are broken themselves and therefore want to break the world around them?

What is the hardest part?

The hardest part is undoing what has been done.

Some would say it is impossible. And on one level, of course it is. The horror has been wrought.

But on another level, a more abstract level, it is not impossible. With every day that we decide to not only embrace life, but also to live it in a way that helps others, we work to undo the damage done.

We vow, in passionate fury and sadness, to do what must be done to make the world whole again.

We vow not to fear those who would destroy the world, but rather to align ourselves with every breath of our lives with those who would repair what is broken.

We vow not to lose sight of what matters, and to do everything we can to ensure that our view of human life as being worth something, as being sacred, is perpetuated, from generation to generation.

It is far easier to destroy than to build.

But goodness itself is a marathon – it is long, and hard, and grueling. It doesn’t show results right away. It is the cumulative sweat and work of day after day, and of the way we hope, and choose, to live our lives.